Still Trying to Convince Myself on RAW

Yes - thanks Alan - the second one with the clouds was a WOW moment. I am a convert. But you know what I wish? I wish the RAW program could recognize the camera - which of course it can - and apply its version of the camera processing as a starting point, to make things faster. Any and all corrections that it makes would be adjustable, but the in camera processing is still a very good starting point.

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Gary Eickmeier

Yeah, the detail in the clouds there really tells the RAW story... That was taken by my wife with her a77. She's a serious point-and-shooter (everything in P mode) but has a great photographic eye and does a nice job with composition. I have her camera set to basic default settings with RAW+JPG and I process those special "keepers" for her. The sky detail you mentioned, blown out in the camera-processed JPG, came back nicely with the RAW. Some would say this was a "poorly exposed image." ...but, really, if it had been exposed darker for the sky then the foreground would have been very underexposed and pulling those shadows would have been very noisy -- it's a good example of the extreme dynamic range that can be attained from the RAW file.

And here's another (taken about 14 minutes earlier at the same location)... I took this with the a99. I don't have an OOC JPG for comparison because I decided a couple of years ago that, for me, I don't want to waste the card space with those JPGs because I can always do better processing them for myself. With this one I was very mindful of exposure & ISO, shooting manual with the aid of the EVF, and I think it really demonstrates (especially after you've seen the a77 OOC default JPG result for this scene above) the dynamic range capabilities of both the a99 sensor, and RAW processing... and it allowed me to bring out that subtle glow of color on the snow capped peaks, illuminated from the sky above, that was so striking that moment: